QB Griffin has raised expectations for bowl-bound Baylor

All aboard the Griffin expressQuarterback Robert Griffin III is taking Baylor for a ride it has been looking forward to for some time

DAVID BARRON, Copyright 2010 Houston Chronicle

Published 6:30 am, Saturday, December 25, 2010

Photo: Jack Dempsey, AP

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Robert Griffin III quickly came face to face with the harsh reality of playing quarterback at Baylor.

Robert Griffin III quickly came face to face with the harsh reality of playing quarterback at Baylor.

Photo: Jack Dempsey, AP

QB Griffin has raised expectations for bowl-bound Baylor

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WACO — Fans have come to expect certain things from Baylor quarterbacks: They will be polite, studious, respectful and mindful of what is expected of them as representatives of the Big 12’s only private school and the nation’s largest Baptist-affiliated university.

And they will sacrifice their bodies in one-sided losses to ham-fisted philistines from Texas, Oklahoma, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma State and Nebraska.

Robert Griffin III, the Bears’ incumbent signal-caller, fits the bill in most categories. He graduated on the Saturday before Christmas, earning his bachelor’s degree in three years, and will enter graduate school next fall. He talks of the divine plan that led him to Baylor, proclaims the virtues of education and hard work, and pledges to fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds’ worth of distance run.

“I live,” he said, “an accelerated life.”

What Griffin does not do, in keeping with the words of the children’s song, is hide his lamp under a bushel. When TCU knocked off the Bears 45-10 this season, he boldly proclaimed it a fluke. He makes lofty projections that he says nobody believes will come true, and when they do, he takes great pains to remind people they came to pass.

He has become, in his second full season as a starter, the confident leader of a confident football team that sees its trip to the Texas Bowl, the Bears’ first postseason game in 16 years, as a steppingstone, not a destination.

“It’s always going to be proving time at Baylor,” he said. “We’re the Christians in the Big 12, not that everybody else isn’t, but we have that reputation of the Baptist university and we will have that chip on our shoulder. We will always have to prove ourselves.”

Despite Baylor’s 7-5 record, its first seven-win season since the Southwest Conference swan song of 1995, Griffin, characteristically, is getting his grump on. That’s in response to the decreased expectations in some quarters for the Bears in the wake of their three-game November losing streak against Oklahoma State, Texas A&M and Oklahoma to end the season.

And, characteristically, he sees the upcoming game at Reliant Stadium as another opportunity to “shock the world.”

“The sky is the limit for Baylor,” Griffin (6-2, 220 pounds) said. “I said that this year, and nobody believed me. Next year, the sky will be the limit again.”

Griffin, in a decision that stings some local football fans, committed to the University of Houston after his senior season at Copperas Cove in 2007 but switched to Baylor when the Bears hired coach Art Briles away from UH. It was the first step of what Griffin divined to be ordained from above.

Good with the bad

“God has a plan for everything, and he brought me and coach Briles here for a reason,” he said. “The wants and needs of everybody in this area … everybody has wanted this program to get back on its feet and stop crawling around, and we’re doing that.”

First, though, he came face to face with the harsh reality of playing quarterback at Baylor. He made several freshman All-America teams, throwing for 15 touchdowns with just three interceptions, but the Bears finished 4-8 on the heels of his 13-2 finish as a senior at Copperas Cove.

“I thought seven wins would be no problem — coming out of high school, all we did was win,” he said. “But I realized how hard it is in college football. Even teams that you see as inferior to you go out and hit hard to get a win. I was shocked.”

And then, a year later, he was hurt, suffering a season-ending knee injury in the third game of the 2009 season and watching from the sidelines as Baylor went 4-8.

By then, even with his physical ailments, he had grasped the truth of Yogi Berra’s observation that 90 percent of baseball, or any sport, is mental.

“I knew by then it was all mental,” he said. “We had the size and speed, but we needed the mindset.”

This season, he captured attention with his comeback from injury, accounting for six touchdowns in opening wins over Sam Houston State and Buffalo, and then with his mouth after shrugging off that pasting by TCU in which the Frogs rolled up 558 yards and held the Bears to 263.

“I knew we had worked too hard and had too much talent on the team to have a showing like that,” he said. “We have changed things here. I knew there needed to be a change in the way guys thought, and we definitely have done that.”

Two weeks later, after a 30-13 win over Rice in his first trip to Houston, he threw for 380 yards as Baylor recorded its most lopsided Big 12 win, 55-7 over Kansas. He accounted for three scores as the Bears sewed up bowl eligibility with their first win since 1997 over Texas 30-22, but managed just two touchdown passes in the three November losses as the Bears were outscored 150-82 during that stretch.

Still under construction

In good times and bad, Briles said, RGIII reflects the mindset and performance of the Bears as a whole.

“His leadership and being able to stay poised is a clear indicator of the type of football team we have to be,” Briles said, “and that is a team that plays with an extreme amount of confidence, passion, energy, intelligence, toughness but at the same time with character, and he exemplifies all those.”

He’s a young man in a hurry, as reflected by his accelerated path toward graduation.

“I was thinking the other day if I could redo it, if I could go to college for five years and not be an athlete and have fun and do what other students do, I wouldn’t,” he said. “I’d do it the same way.”

He will return for his junior year, potentially his last season in college, having participated in a significant piece of Baylor football history with eyes fixed on doing more.

“I saw the opportunity to come here and play football, have fun, shock everybody and give them something to cheer about, and we’ve done that,” he said. “I didn’t know much about Baylor before I came here, but I’m entrenched in it now.”